Mindset Matters

I feel like I learn a lot from my kids. As a first-time parent for the fifth go-round, I am being educated like never before. A couple nights ago, I was sitting down on the floor with my eleven-month-old son. We were enjoying some nice, relaxing down-time when the peaceful quiet was shattered by the orders being barked my oldest, Braelynn. “One hundred jumping jacks and ten burpees! NOW!!!” As my daughter was channeling her inner drill sergeant, all these kids started coming out of nowhere like some kinda midget flash mob. As the initial surprise faded, I realized all these kids were actually mine and I was quite impressed with their swift and orderly response. As they began to knock out their jumping jacks, I wondered why they don’t obey their parents with this much enthusiasm, but I digress. As the four oldest worked through their calisthenics, I noticed my baby gazing intently at the events unfolding. His eyes grew wide with fascination as he watched his older siblings...

My grandfather lived an extraordinary life. Just so you understand the type of person he was, you should know he once broke his leg as a young man, yet was still out plowing fields that same day. He never once received medical attention for the fracture and never missed a day of work. In the Navy during World War II, he received word that his wife, my grandmother, was gravely ill. His leave was denied, but he left anyway, embarking on a journey to see his bride that would rival the best Hollywood love stories. Later in life, as a chicken farmer, he ended up going bankrupt. He lost his farm and his livelihood as the unpaid creditors stacked up. But he picked himself back up, dusted himself off and began a successful career in the insurance industry. He then went and repaid every one of his former creditors, even though the bankruptcy courts absolved any and all legal obligation to do so. He did it because it was the right thing to do. That was my grandpa. Despite these and man...

On a trip to the moon, a space shuttle requires two huge rocket boosters to power it out of the earth’s atmosphere and into space. After about two minutes, the rockets burn out and are released, leaving the shuttle to rely on its three main engines for the remainder of the journey to the moon and returning it safely to earth. Out of the one-week round trip expedition, the rockets are used for merely 120 seconds. Here’s what’s even more amazing though, in that two minutes, the rockets provide over 70% of the total power required to get to the moon and back! The round- trip distance traveled by the shuttle during that excursion will be about half a million miles, but well over two thirds of the energy is spent over the initial 27 miles. Changing your own behavior is similar in that a huge percentage of the effort must be spent in the very early stages of “lift off.” Whether it’s breaking old, bad habits or creating new, positive ones, changing your behavior relies on a trem...

I just returned home this morning from a conference full of very successful financial professionals. Overall, it was a great group of people and all of them had worked hard and sacrificed to get where they are today. However, I noticed a distinction that seemed to separate my peers into two groups. Although we were all there to learn how to make our practices more effective and efficient, some were clearly there to learn how to get better, while others were there to find out how to make things easier. There seemed to be a hunger and a burning desire to improve in one group, but for the rest, it was as if they felt they had paid their dues and deserved to coast. Some were seeking comfort, while some pursued a calling. The mindset, the questions and perspective were very different between these two divisions of professionals, and the contrast was quite drastic. I’ll bet you can guess which group was having the most fun.   And this isn’t just in the world of finance. The...

What if quitting was a learned behavior? Have you ever considered that? And if so, when do you think you learned to quit? I have a ten-month old son, Brecken, who is beginning to attempt walking. He will pull himself up on furniture, bob up and down a little bit, maybe side step some, and then eventually fall down. To this point, he’s known nothing but failure. Each attempt ends up with him landing squarely on his little behind, yet he remains enthusiastic and sometimes even giddy during these attempts. Why? To start with, he’s exploring new and exciting horizons, experimenting ways to get into more trouble faster and more efficiently than ever before! But he also hasn’t learned to quit. He doesn’t know failure has a stigma. He hasn’t been inundated by people who have decided to just settle, being content to crawl for the rest of their lives because falling became too painful. In fact, he’s surrounded by four older siblings, all of whom walk, and he is eager to join the...

Most of us have a natural inclination to be crisis-minded rather than proactive. We get caught up doing the things that are urgent, but not important, instead of doing what is important, but not urgent. With constant email alerts, text dings, and social media updates, it’s easy for the urgent but unimportant to feel both urgent and important. Even a phone call from a friend or a last minute meeting can sneak in there and gain undeserved temporary priority. After all, Aunt Sally could be calling about something REALLY critical to the future of the universe   … or she might just want to talk about her cats. Important-but-not-urgent things are necessary, but can be put off until another day. The problem is, “another day” can be delayed indefinitely. Putting aside time to plan out a presentation for work doesn’t have to happen this instant, but we may let too many instances like this go by and they then become a crisis, urgent and important, and we are then driven into a...

My oldest daughter, Braelynn, wants a horse. She built out a budget to chart out the expected costs. She created a work plan to save for the horse. She even produced a four-page proposal, highlighting the benefits of horse ownership and explaining why a horse would be good for our family. The amount of work and planning she put into this was beyond impressive. Despite her effort and enthusiasm, I still said “no.” Now, I won’t go into detail about how Brae has turned friends and family against me in her quest to procure a horse, including but not limited to enlisting my own mother to clip out horse ads for her from the classifieds (yes, my mom is one of 17 people in Anchorage who still get the paper). But I will say she and her siblings, determined to be reasonable and cooperative I’m sure, came up with a compromise: a dog. While I did think they were going in the right direction at least in the size of the desired pet size, I explained to them we didn’t need anything else pee...

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” – Edmund Burke Do you curse what you have? Do you undermine or downplay your resources and abilities because they aren’t where you’d like them to be? It’s a common but dangerous trap to be caught up in, dwelling on what you don’t have and can’t do rather than on making the most of the abilities and opportunities you do have. We all have something to give and good we are capable of producing. Even if it doesn’t seem to be much, sometimes all you can do is all you can do. In the Bible, we learn of an impoverished widow who gives away two nearly worthless, tiny coins, which was all the money she had. Financially, the amount was insignificant at best. Yet, she has been memorialized for two thousand years – not because of the amount she gave, but because of the magnitude of her sacrifice. As little as it was, she gave all she had when she could have easily done nothing. Rather than f...

I run into far too many people who get up every morning and go to a job they don’t care about while living a life that’s completely unfulfilling because they think it’s “safe.” My first reaction is that slowly dying is certainly not living; allowing your soul to be eroded a day at a time is certainly not safe. But I want to take that one step further. Now, there are a lot of areas of life we could talk about, but let’s look just at the workplace for the moment. Our society is filled with plenty of people justifying their career choice with, “Yeah, it’s just a job, but at least it’s a steady paycheck.” Which is true … until it’s not.  We are almost four weeks into a government shutdown that has hundreds of thousands of government workers nervously out of work. Sure, many of those folks will be paid for that time when this all gets resolved, but they are still trying to pay bills and make ends meet without a paycheck.     IBM laid off 60k employees in 1993 a...

Sometimes we are so consumed with the reasons why something might not work that we undermine our own efforts to accomplish the task. It’s as if we put more energy into excuses than we do into possible solutions. A couple weeks ago I sent my four oldest kids to shovel the driveway and decks. We do have a fairly large driveway, but the snowfall was moderate – maybe about four inches – and there would be four of them shoveling, so I figured they’d be fine. After about ten minutes, Braelynn, my oldest, comes back inside and informs me the task is insurmountable. The driveway simply couldn’t be shoveled and would probably require a solution that clearly wasn’t available to modern society. I sent her back out. A few minutes later my youngest daughter, Brooklynn, comes in and gives a similar report. There’s just too much snow and her legs are getting cold. I told her to put snowpants on over her shorts (yes, she’s in shorts, shoveling snow) and return to the job. Shortly thereafter, B...

Inquoris "Inky" Johnson, the former All-American defensive back for Tennessee, talks about being “efficient, but not effective.” He defines this as “doing things right, but not doing the right thing.” He wasn’t referring to going headlong into the obviously wrong direction, but rather being distracted by things that may be perfectly fine. While seemingly harmless or even beneficial, these interruptions still pull us away from our mission and calling – diverted by what’s good from what is best . It’s easy to lose focus in a frenzied world where activity is often mistaken for achievement. We can get disoriented in the commotion of life as there is always something out there waiting to divert our attention and blur our vision of the mission. Sometimes, the most difficult thing to do is to simply stand there, letting the world fly by for a moment, just to recalibrate and realign our focus and direction. Before worrying about how fast you can move, first make sure y...

George Washington’s favorite play was Cato, written by Joseph Addison. This play depicts the final days of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, also known as Cato the Younger, as he battles the tyranny of Julius Caesar. Given the tyranny that Washington himself fought, it’s no wonder this was one of his most beloved works of art. In the play, Cato famously remarks, "We can't guarantee success, we can do something better, we can deserve it." Simple but profound, those words teach an important lesson. Success is an outcome; it’s a variable outside of our control. We all want the promise of success and the guarantee our sacrifice will pay off and reward us, but such certainty rarely exists. During an especially trying time during the American Revolution, amidst daunting uncertainty, John Adams penned those same words to his wife, Abigail, “We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it." There was no assurance of prevailing, but Adams and the other foundi...

Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but it can also trip people up. There is an endless ocean of information out there, and thanks to technology, it is ever at our fingertips. And that is a wonderful phenomenon, for which I am incredibly grateful. Never before has information been so readily and efficiently distributed. But here’s the dark side of this equation: you can never know enough. If there is one thing I have discovered in exploring some of the immense knowledge being shared via books and internet by our world’s leading experts and innovators, there is always more I don’t know, and the more I learn, the more I realize I am ignorant. This realization can be crippling if we aren’t careful. Learning and education must be balanced by doing. Just like nutrition, if we are only taking in food and never exercising, we get obese. If we are only doing and exercising, but not being replenished with nutritious food, we get weak and famished. Balance is vitally important. In th...

Although most can agree that self-discipline is a noble character quality, there are many who view it as a restrictive and inflexible trait. It’s as if they feel having self-discipline relegates you to a monk-like existence on the top of a mountain or turns you into a robotic being with no feelings or sense of passion and enjoyment. I have always seen self-discipline as a form of self-respect, but actor Will Smith views it even more than that. Smith says, “self-discipline is the highest form of self-love.” I got to thinking about that and it is absolutely true. My kids don’t get everything they want. They certainly don’t do everything they want either. Sometimes I even make them do things they don’t want to do. I make them do homework and chores. I put them to bed at a decent time so they get plenty of sleep. I ensure, as best as I can, they eat healthy and exercise. Through both punishment and rewards, I incentivize good behavior and teach them to respect others. I try to...

From the outside looking in, it may seem like we have everything together. We live in a nice house and in a nice neighborhood. I own a small but successful company. I have a beautiful wife who is, if possible, even more gorgeous than on the day we married. She’s always put together and you’d never guess she’s given birth to five kids and home schools each one (Well, four out of the five anyway. We have a ten month old but he doesn’t seem like “academic material” yet. He can’t write worth a darn, he’s a very poor reader and his pronunciation of words is so terrible so we are holding him back. He was born premature so maybe we will give him another chance in the future.) Ah yes, the five kids. This is where things get interesting. Kids have a way of undermining your best of intentions and exposing any and all of your weaknesses. They are relentless and, just like sharks, can smell fear. I love my kids very much, but they often make me question my parenting abilities. Perhaps thi...

We are coming to the end of the first week of the New Year. There is certainly both apprehension and excitement for what this year will bring. Many have made resolutions, hoping to make adjustments in themselves and their habits that will improve the quality of their life. Statistically, however, most of those resolutions are bound to fail. We humans just don’t do a good job of keeping promises to ourselves and committing to lasting change. I believe part of the issue is the empty hope that a new year will bring the circumstances and the motivation allowing for positive differences to be made. Sustained improvement is only achieved by winning the daily battle against self and its desire for comfort and ease. One must decide to make the advancement despite circumstances and resolve to choose to move forward along that path, day in and day out. A new you won’t come from a new year’s resolution, but rather a new day’s resolution. It requires a commitment to intentional acts ...